Click to View

Palm today closed its recapitalization deal with Elevation Partners, a private-equity firm that gains a 27 percent stake in the PDA and smartphone maker in return.

The agreement infuses Palm with a much need $325 million, which it plans to use—along with $400 million of new debt—to finance a $9 per share cash distribution to shareholders.

It also gains a pair of new board members, Elevation co-founders and managing directors Fred Anderson - a former Apple CFO - and Roger McName, as well as a new executive chairman of the board, former Apple senior VP of hardware engineering and head of the iPod division Jon Rubinstein, among other things.

By closing the deal with Elevation, Palm expects to capture some of the magic Rubinstein and Anderson helped conjure at Apple, leading it to become a top-tier mobile device vendor once again

"This transaction lays the groundwork for Palm to recapture our position as the leading innovator and brand of the mobile-computing revolution,” said Palm president & CEO Ed Colligan in statement. “We will build on our history of innovation to create next-generation, software-rich mobile solutions that enable people to more effectively manage their lives and communicate with family, friends and colleagues wherever they are." "

One of the hurdles Palm faces is the lack of a follow up to the aging and outdated Palm OS, which it still uses for half its products. The other half run on Windows Mobile.

Unfortunately, Palm CEO Ed Colligan indicated not too long ago products based on the company's Linux-based follow-up to the Palm platform wouldn’t arrive until the end of next year.

Even worse, Rubinstein extended the timeframe even further away, telling Dow Jones Newswires yesterday he expected it would take 18 months. He said, “It’s probably a good target…These things take time."

If Rubinstein turns out to be right, new Palm products running on a new mobile platform won’t arrive until well into 2009, likely during the second half of the year.

I don't know about you, but Colligan's one year estimate already seem too long to me.

However long it takes, be it a year, 18 months or some length of time in-between, in the meantime Palm is either going to have to continue to use the most recent edition of the Palm platform, Garnet, which is already several years old, or become just another Windows Mobile license.

Whatever it looks like form the outside, Rubinstein is optimistic. He said in in a statement today: "Palm's future roadmap in terms of both the software and products is impressive and complements the new products that Palm has recently introduced. While there is much work to be done, there are exciting days ahead for all of us."